X-33/VentureStar - What really happened

[Spiceman]

Dysprosium

Ha ha I remember that joke. Was a pretty good one, imagine the faces in the marketing departement when an engineer pointedly noted that.     

[Overtone]

Iridium, Teledesic, Globalstar were the three major efforts, but just like today with Kuiper and the chinese there were a bunch of other competitors, with the usual varied degree of seriousness (ARCA early seeds were probably planted back then... shudders).

IRL Teledisc never happened and it was Orbcomm (launched on Pegasus solids that IIRC made the best running).
BTW all went through Chapter 11 and still exist. The joke about Iridium (Element 77) shrank to 66 satellites, which is actually "Dysprosium" 
IOW it's possible to make a satellite comms business and (eventually) make a profit it at.

But boy is it tough.

Not sure what this has to do with X-33/VentureStar, mods feel free to move elsewhere together with preceding

In the 2000s I worked with a guy who had formerly been the chief engineer for GlobalStar.

He said they had succeeded technically and were making it financially, because they had selected a dramatically simpler architecture than Iridium and a more focused marketing plan so their buildout costs were much lower and their business case actually closed... until Iridium went bankrupt.  Iridium's assets got purchased by new owners for cents on the dollar. The new owners could then offer service at much lower rates without having to pay back a constellation build/launch cost.  That's the market shift that forced GlobalStar into bankruptcy.

IOW it's dangerous in a frontloaded capital-intensive business to have financially-weak competitors that manage to get their services operational.

[LittleBird]

Iridium, Teledesic, Globalstar were the three major efforts, but just like today with Kuiper and the chinese there were a bunch of other competitors, with the usual varied degree of seriousness (ARCA early seeds were probably planted back then... shudders).

IRL Teledisc never happened and it was Orbcomm (launched on Pegasus solids that IIRC made the best running).
BTW all went through Chapter 11 and still exist. The joke about Iridium (Element 77) shrank to 66 satellites, which is actually "Dysprosium" 
IOW it's possible to make a satellite comms business and (eventually) make a profit it at.

But boy is it tough.

And mods do feel free to move my post also. I do actually plan to start a comsat-related thread quite soon that this would fit into but my "day job" keeps intervening ;-)

There's an interesting analysis of how Iridium did it here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-iridium-5615034/, from 20 years ago.

[LittleBird]

Picking up the question of, ahem, diversion of money, as was originally recently mentioned here in the STS context

I did not cover STS until my last year at OMB — which was consumed by Columbia — so I never really dealt with that operational marching army.  But my impression from that time is that a lot of underutilized workforce and facilities and overhead were bookkept against STS that had little or nothing to do with STS.  I’m not saying dealing with those problems would have cut STS costs in half, but if Griffin had not killed full-cost accounting and if program managers had been given more authority and responsibility for their program costs and budgets, STS costs might have come down at the margin and NASA would have its arms around Orion/SLS costs much better than it does today.

I nearly dropped my coffee (not a euphemism) when I saw a rather more directly X-33/spaceplane related statement in what is supposedly Congressional testimony by ex-SDI director Henry Cooper archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20070729025229/http://www.tgv-rockets.com/press/cooper_testimony.htm
from October 2001.  I haven't yet checked that it agrees with the primary document[Edit: have now and quote is correct, see grabs via Google play], but was struck that he allegedly said:

The subcommittee should also note that tens of millions authorized and appropriated for military spaceplanes in the 90s was often diverted for other purposes.  I understand the NASA historian has written a very interesting paper on this subject, and suggest you may want to review it.

Any idea which historian (Heppenheimer?) and which paper ?

[VSECOTSPE]

The subcommittee should also note that tens of millions authorized and appropriated for military spaceplanes in the 90s was often diverted for other purposes.  I understand the NASA historian has written a very interesting paper on this subject, and suggest you may want to review it.

I suspect the funds were legally diverted with notification to congressional appropriators.  It’s true that  Clinton Administration policy divided space launch development responsibilities between DOD for EELVs and NASA for RLVs.  And it’s probably true that DOD funds appropriated for RLV (or MSP or whatever) development we’re redirected to other DOD programs/purposes after that Clinton policy came into force.  But that doesn’t mean that there was any illegal or even suspect accounting going on.  Departments/agencies routinely reprogram appropriated funds by notifying the responsible appropriations subcommittees.  I don’t know what these notifications are called at DOD, but NASA calls them Operating Plans or Op Plans.  The responsible subcommittee has a certain amount of time (some weeks) to review them.  If the subcommittee does not object within that timeframe, then the Op Plan is approved and the department or agency moves forward with the reprogramming.  Stuff happens (accidents, natural disasters, changes in foreign threats, changes in other policy or law, etc.), and appropriated budgets have to adjust.

That’s different from what I was talking about.  The STS budget (and I suspect SLS today) had substantial NASA infrastructure and overhead bookkept against it that had little or nothing to do with STS.  This stuff was part of the agency’s annual budget request for STS to appropriators and the appropriators looked the other way (to the extent they even knew/cared).  But that stuff really should have been broken out separately, justified on its own terms, and funding terminated (or not) accordingly.

[LittleBird]

The subcommittee should also note that tens of millions authorized and appropriated for military spaceplanes in the 90s was often diverted for other purposes.  I understand the NASA historian has written a very interesting paper on this subject, and suggest you may want to review it.

I suspect the funds were legally diverted with notification to congressional appropriators.  It’s true that  Clinton Administration policy divided space launch development responsibilities between DOD for EELVs and NASA for RLVs.  And it’s probably true that DOD funds appropriated for RLV (or MSP or whatever) development we’re redirected to other DOD programs/purposes after that Clinton policy came into force.  But that doesn’t mean that there was any illegal or even suspect accounting going on.  Departments/agencies routinely reprogram appropriated funds by notifying the responsible appropriations subcommittees.  I don’t know what these notifications are called at DOD, but NASA calls them Operating Plans or Op Plans.  The responsible subcommittee has a certain amount of time (some weeks) to review them.  If the subcommittee does not object within that timeframe, then the Op Plan is approved and the department or agency moves forward with the reprogramming.  Stuff happens (accidents, natural disasters, changes in foreign threats, changes in other policy or law, etc.), and appropriated budgets have to adjust.

That’s different from what I was talking about.  The STS budget (and I suspect SLS today) had substantial NASA infrastructure and overhead bookkept against it that had little or nothing to do with STS.  This stuff was part of the agency’s annual budget request for STS to appropriators and the appropriators looked the other way (to the extent they even knew/cared).  But that stuff really should have been broken out separately, justified on its own terms, and funding terminated (or not) accordingly.

Good to know, thanks. But to repeat my second question, does anybody know what the paper Cooper was referring to is, and is it the same as this, from an earlier post (#61):

We actually funded an X-33 history project by an objective historian...here is link:

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x-33/menu1.htm

Cheers,

Doug Stanley

If so, where can that history to be found now-link is dead ?

[leovinus]

Good to know, thanks. But to repeat my second question, does anybody know what the paper Cooper was referring to is, and is it the same as this, from an earlier post (#61):

We actually funded an X-33 history project by an objective historian...here is link:

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x-33/menu1.htm

Cheers,

Doug Stanley

If so, where can that history to be found now-link is dead ?

When you follow that link via archive.org and the Wayback machine then we get to an archived copy here
https://web.archive.org/web/20220705041930/https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x-33/menu1.htm
which leads to here
https://web.archive.org/web/20190131205519/https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x-33/project.htm
where it says

PRELIMINARY PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Andrew J. Butrica
1 July 1997

and

Monograph

Originally, one of the first major publications of the X-33 History Project was to be a monograph of under 100 pages on some aspect of the development of the X-33. The monograph would be limited in scope, appropriately illustrated, and accompanied by original documents in an appendix. When completed, the monograph would have been made available from NASA, as well as the X-33 History Project, through this home page.

Instead of the monograph, however, the Historian, with the agreement of NASA, lengthened the draft monograph into a book-length manuscript. The book deals with the history of the DC-X, built by McDonnell Douglas for the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization's Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) Program. It traces the search for reusable and single-stage-to-orbit launchers from early concepts to the creation of the SSTO Program to the transformation of the DC-X into the DC-XA as a NASA program, the first X vehicle in the space agency's new RLV Program.

The book manuscript is now in a draft form and is undergoing review by various individuals, most of whom were involved in the history of the DC-X and DC-XA. The current plan is to see the manuscript published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2003.

Therefore, it seems to me that the monograph was never completed. It was converted into a book by Andrew Butrica titled "Single Stage to Orbit", ISBN 0-8018-7338-X, 2003. I copied some pages from the Preface and Bibliographic essay which explains the monograph to book journey in more detail, attached.

[LittleBird]

Good to know, thanks. But to repeat my second question, does anybody know what the paper Cooper was referring to is, and is it the same as this, from an earlier post (#61):

We actually funded an X-33 history project by an objective historian...here is link:

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x-33/menu1.htm

Cheers,

Doug Stanley

If so, where can that history to be found now-link is dead ?

When you follow that link via archive.org and the Wayback machine then we get to an archived copy here
https://web.archive.org/web/20220705041930/https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x-33/menu1.htm
which leads to here
https://web.archive.org/web/20190131205519/https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x-33/project.htm
where it says

PRELIMINARY PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Andrew J. Butrica
1 July 1997

and

Monograph

Originally, one of the first major publications of the X-33 History Project was to be a monograph of under 100 pages on some aspect of the development of the X-33. The monograph would be limited in scope, appropriately illustrated, and accompanied by original documents in an appendix. When completed, the monograph would have been made available from NASA, as well as the X-33 History Project, through this home page.

Instead of the monograph, however, the Historian, with the agreement of NASA, lengthened the draft monograph into a book-length manuscript. The book deals with the history of the DC-X, built by McDonnell Douglas for the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization's Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) Program. It traces the search for reusable and single-stage-to-orbit launchers from early concepts to the creation of the SSTO Program to the transformation of the DC-X into the DC-XA as a NASA program, the first X vehicle in the space agency's new RLV Program.

The book manuscript is now in a draft form and is undergoing review by various individuals, most of whom were involved in the history of the DC-X and DC-XA. The current plan is to see the manuscript published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2003.

Therefore, it seems to me that the monograph was never completed. It was converted into a book by Andrew Butrica titled "Single Stage to Orbit", ISBN 0-8018-7338-X, 2003. I copied some pages from the Preface and Bibliographic essay which explains the monograph to book journey in more detail, attached.

Many many thanks, and for anyone who is curious iirc quite a decent sized sampler of Butrica book is either on Kindle or Google books.

[Spiceman]

Thanks for the good old website, it's a treasure trove !

[LittleBird]

Thanks for the good old website, it's a treasure trove !

Isn't it. I still wonder if the paper Cooper mentioned is subsumed into Butrica's book or now lost.

[leovinus]

Thanks for the good old website, it's a treasure trove !

Isn't it. I still wonder if the paper Cooper mentioned is subsumed into Butrica's book or now lost.

Try at NARA catalog.archives.gov Per Butrica's book, page 258, we know NARA has the X-33 archives as 255-01-0645 where RG-255 is roughly "all NASA stuff". At page 247, there is a reference 41 to a memorandum by Henry F. Cooper to Rep. Murtha, File #291. Therefore, it is likely there are more memos by Cooper at NARA.

EDIT: there is one thing that might make such a search easier. On page 258, Butrica says

The reader thus will find throughout this work’s endnotes numerous references to records in the X-33 Archive. The archive includes an electronic guide to the files and their contents on CD.

In other words, there is a CD with a reasonable index of the X-33 material seen by Butrica. If someone has a copy then that might quickly answer your question above about Cooper's memo. Alternatively, maybe drop NARA a note and ask them for a copy of CD.

[LittleBird]

Thanks for the good old website, it's a treasure trove !

Isn't it. I still wonder if the paper Cooper mentioned is subsumed into Butrica's book or now lost.

Try at NARA catalog.archives.gov Per Butrica's book, page 258, we know NARA has the X-33 archives as 255-01-0645 where RG-255 is roughly "all NASA stuff". At page 247, there is a reference 41 to a memorandum by Henry F. Cooper to Rep. Murtha, File #291. Therefore, it is likely there are more memos by Cooper at NARA.

EDIT: there is one thing that might make such a search easier. On page 258, Butrica says

The reader thus will find throughout this work’s endnotes numerous references to records in the X-33 Archive. The archive includes an electronic guide to the files and their contents on CD.

In other words, there is a CD with a reasonable index of the X-33 material seen by Butrica. If someone has a copy then that might quickly answer your question above about Cooper's memo. Alternatively, maybe drop NARA a note and ask them for a copy of CD.

Thanks-TBH I should really start by reading Butrica, Heppenheimer and the NASP histories before I go down any more rabbit holes but I'll keep it in mind.

[Blackstar]

There are also 37 pages of comments in this thread. It is possible that some of the answers you seek are way up-thread.

[LittleBird]

There are also 37 pages of comments in this thread. It is possible that some of the answers you seek are way up-thread.

There are indeed, and thanks for reminding me to acknowledge this extraordinary thread which is now 20-odd years long. I did in fact learn many things from reading through them, and in fact, as I said, post #61 by Doug Stanley is where I got the existence of the NASA X-33 history project (which gave rise to Butrica's book) from. But I didn't see any mention of reprogramming of funds, as per Cooper's rather throwaway remark in his Congressional testimony of 2001. So I am grateful to VSECOTSPE for clarifying that such reprogramming wouldn't actually be that unusual, and to leovinus for tracking down the likely best place to look if I wanted to pursue it further.

But on balance I think I have concluded that it would behove me to learn more about X-33 itself, and particularly the science of turbulence as it applies to SSTO etc,  before any further digging into a nearly 25-year old political and budgetary story which clearly meant a lot more to many other people on this board than it did to me. However I'll be reading about spaceplanes with a lot more interest from now on, in this and other threads like the MDAC GRM-29 one.

[Spiceman]

Down into the rabbit hole... I've been learning about RLV / SSTO / TSTO since 2002, still finding new stuff. I have a few hundreds tech papers on my HD.

[LittleBird]

Down into the rabbit hole... I've been learning about RLV / SSTO / TSTO since 2002, still finding new stuff. I have a few hundreds tech papers on my HD.

Indeed --- I'm just trying to learn how to choose my rabbit holes ;-)

[Proponent]

I'd have thought that by the mid-1990s it was perfectly obvious that not only had the Shuttle failed to make spaceflight cheaper and safer, but it wasn't even a step the right direction. Why did anybody think the right move was to once again attempt a big technological leap in the expectation that a safe, economic operational vehicle would quickly follow? It's as though the attitude was, "The Shuttle was too easy; let's build an SSTO!"

[Spiceman]

Because NASA manned spaceflight, and because Lockheed: both disfunctional. No lesson learned.

More pointedly: DC-X was a red herring, for two reasons. First, it did not solved the mass fraction issue. Secondly, its successor DC-Y was screwed in favor of Lockheed X-33 flawed design.

Mass fraction for hydrolox: 0.88 as the absolute bare minimum to make orbit with zero payload. Hence, 0.90 for a meagre payload.

[LittleBird]

I'd have thought that by the mid-1990s it was perfectly obvious that not only had the Shuttle failed to make spaceflight cheaper and safer, but it wasn't even a step the right direction. Why did anybody think the right move was to once again attempt a big technological leap in the expectation that a safe, economic operational vehicle would quickly follow? It's as though the attitude was, "The Shuttle was too easy; let's build an SSTO!"

Interesting and concise take on it here, from Gorn and de Chiara's book on X-planes. Rather suggests that Dan Goldin made them an offer they couldn't refuse (or at least posed Lockheed, MDAC and Rockwell a challenge they felt they couldn't not take part in) ?

[LittleBird]

I'd have thought that by the mid-1990s it was perfectly obvious that not only had the Shuttle failed to make spaceflight cheaper and safer, but it wasn't even a step the right direction. Why did anybody think the right move was to once again attempt a big technological leap in the expectation that a safe, economic operational vehicle would quickly follow? It's as though the attitude was, "The Shuttle was too easy; let's build an SSTO!"

Interesting and concise take on it here, from Gorn and de Chiara's book on X-planes. Rather suggests that Dan Goldin made them an offer they couldn't refuse (or at least posed Lockheed, MDAC and Rockwell a challenge they felt they couldn't not take part in) ?

And following up on that book's thesis,  here's the link to NASA's 1993 Access to Space study: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19940022648/downloads/19940022648.pdf
Well worth a look if like me you hadn't seen it.

I'm sure this report must have been discussed ad nauseam on this board somewhere but the most X-33/VentureStar relevant part seems to be in the overall mindset and thus the  approaches of the 3  different teams. Arguably team 2 is not too different from EELV architecture that emerged not that long after, while the RLV that option 3 proposes embodies the aspirations for where any such vehicle  was hoped to lead to.